The influence of causal information on judgments of treatment efficacy

How does the causal structure of a problem concept influence judgments of treatment efficacy? We argue that the task of evaluating treatment efficacy involves a combination of causal reasoning and categorization. After an exemplar has been categorized, a treatment task involves judging where to intervene in the causal structure to eradicate the problem, removing the exemplar from category membership. We hypothesized that the processes underlying such category membership removal tasks are not identical to those underlying categorization. Whereas previous experiments have shown that both the root cause (as the most generative feature) and the coherence of the exemplar heavily influence categorization, Experiments 1 and 2 showed that people base category membership removal judgments on the root cause. In Experiment 3, people spontaneously chose to remove an exemplar from category membership when asked to treat the terminal effect. We discuss how our findings are compatible with existing models of categorization. A description of pilot studies for Experiment 1 may be downloaded as supplemental materials from mc.psychonomic-journals.org.